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Comment by sigmaprimus | Hacker News Reader

It's odd, when I think of Fascism it is such a different thing than described in this article and many others. I feel that fascism is an unholy alliance between the state and corporate interests, where the corporations support the state through private enforcement of unconstitutional laws, while the state supports the corporations through favorable policies and mandates.

It seems to me that because WWII Germany was both a fascist and racist state they have been conflated to be one in the same.

The creation of Good Information Inc. by one of the largest political donors in the world seems to me to be a far better and terrifying example of true fascism.

https://www.axios.com/soros-hoffman-disinformation-tara-mcgo...

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> It's odd, when I think of Fascism it is such a different thing than described in this article and many others.

> It seems to me that because WWII Germany was both a fascist and racist state they have been conflated to be one in the same.

I don't think you and others commenting here read the article. The author doesn't conflate fascism and racism. He illustrates how fascism in contemporary American politics harnesses racial insecurity in its adherents, just as Nazism did in Germany.

> I feel that fascism is an unholy alliance between the state and corporate interests

From the article:

"The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business"

"there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest"

Correct. The word that these so called 'journalists' are looking for is more like 'authoritarian' rather than 'fascism' or 'Nazism'.

Even by reading the article, it already suggests that the authors were spending too much time playing Nazi-related computer games in VR to bother even knowing what fascism is.

It's not really fascism, but it's not just authoritarianism either. There are many different kinds of authoritarianism.

"Fascism" was applied to several different situations where a legal government became more and more dictatorial. It also connotes nationalism, originally applied to right-wing groups rather than left-wing groups.

It has since been applied so widely as generically "intolerant and authoritarian", but this article is using it in a sense slightly closer to the way it was applied by Mussolini and then Franco. In particular, it's focusing on the ethnic nationalism aspect of it, and there the article is focusing on specific factors of US national life.

If one wanted to be super originalistic in the way the term is used, it would apply only to the Mussolini regime, because that's where the word was coined. By that definition the Nazis aren't fascists, either.

Anybody using the term will have to be clear how loosely they're applying it. In this case, the author is drawing real historical parallels to both the Mussolini regime and other related nationalist, totalitarian regimes. It's not historically illiterate.

> Correct. The word that these so called 'journalists' are looking for is more like 'authoritarian' rather than 'fascism' or 'Nazism'.

> Even by reading the article, it already suggests that the authors were spending too much time playing Nazi-related computer games in VR to bother even knowing what fascism is.

This is rich. The article's author (singular) is Jason Stanley. He's a frequent writer on the topics of propaganda and authoritarianism, and has written books on political philosophy and fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Stanley

The terms fascism and nazism have been so abused that I wouldn’t be surprised that both ideologies end up being normalized for real in the immediate future. But true fascism and nazism, not this “my antiquated conservative political adversaries are nazis because I don’t like rural Christian white old folks and their last century moral values”

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